The morning of the all hands summon to the Blasted Lands, Aely went for a walk. The late fall air was clear and cool, and leaves crunched under their feet in the less-traveled parts of the streets. She and Roger took the long way around Old Town, south through Tanner Circle and down Bulwarks, across […]

For awhile, I was even getting paid to write things (and being employed as a writer was pretty cool) – though sadly that job doesn’t exist anymore.

And the more I write – about the various Annas that hang out around this little corner of the internet – the more I wish I wasn’t writing something that is, essentially derivative. I could never make these works my own. They’re my writing, but I’m writing in a borrowed world. And, should they decide that my writing is in some way bothersome to their copyright, the Big Shots at Blizzard could email me a cease and desist, and tell me to take all of my writing down.

This is not ideal – especially for characters like Aelflaed, who could easily stand on her own in another world, because who and what she is doesn’t depend on the Warcraft Universe.

My response has always been no, since November is incredibly busy, since I have houseguests and traveling to do, and since – to be honest – I don’t have a novel’s worth of writing planned out. Of course, the fact that I don’t have it planned out is largely a factor of my not having planned it out. I have characters rattling around in my head, to be sure. And bits and snags of world building too.

So I’m pitching my hat in the ring.

Publically.

(Which is scary, really – now I can’t weasel out of it.)

I have nine days to plan out what I’ll write, and then thirty days to write 50 thousand words. Fifty Thousand. For reference – the Wrathgate story (not including the epilogue post) is around 6500 words.

No, my writing will not be public – I don’t post unedited writing, and the essence of writing 1700 words per day means I don’t have time to edit. But yes, it will be fiction. Probably fantasy. Possibly somewhat historically grounded fantasy – dunno. We’ll see. I’m going to go plan now.

I’ve just recently been hit with inspiration to write as well, I decided to start now though, rather than wait for November, because I’m paranoid that the inspiration will flit away. Still, it’s cool that it seems to have happened around “that time of year”, and I’ve now set myself a personal, casual goal to see if I can finish by the end of November as well…

due to the time constraints and word count expectations of nanowrimo, it’s pretty much inevitable that a good amount of your writing will indeed be terrible. but that’s the whole point of it. nano is the way it is so that you can go and write out a whole draft of a story without worries to quality, something that you can (and should) do when the story is finished.

@Krizzly – I understand that part of the idea behind NaNo is that you’re writing a Novel. Not a “Good” novel. Just a novel.

However, I struggle frequently with plot ideas, and I kinda like the one I’ve got running, so we’ll see. I have a lot of planning to do, and I instinctually edit while I write – I always have. I’ll probably be employing Lauren’s technique of copying things into another open document instead of deleting them, but sitting down to write front to back isn’t going to work for me. I’ll be working at various sections at the same time – just like I did with the Aely story.

As much as I love the idea of NaNo, I’m not going to try to completely revamp the way that I write in order to make some randomly determined goal from some group of people I don’t know and (frankly) don’t care about XD. While I will not be editing or polishing the way I normally do, things ARE going to get moved around, since I can’t sit down and write something from top to bottom.

I can’t even do it with a blog comment, let alone a research paper, a short story, or (eep) a novel.

@anna you’re absolutely right. there are no hard and fast rules to writing; nano is just an opportunity to get people to write in the first place, and i for one am excited that you are going to take up on this challenge!

I just want to poke my head in here to say good luck and congratulations for having the ::ahem:: balls to take the leap and participate in NaNoWriMo.

I have so many ideas floating around in my head for stories, characters, WoW fan fiction, etc, but I’m too much of a wuss to write anything past notes and snippets because I’m too afraid of writing crap. I write for my day job but there’s something holding me back from writing fiction for my own pleasure (I used to write a lot). So seeing someone who has the guts to participate in something that scares the crap out of me makes me jealous and super happy for you.

I love reading all the fiction you post here, and I’m sure you’ll do a great job during NaNoWriMo. I hope we can see it someday!

It’s easily doable (easy being relative to those days when the ink flows, and the days when you smash your face for hours against the keyboard.) Know when to walk away from the keyboard for those brief, sanity granting moments.

In regards to the need to perhaps write things out of order, and not necessarily start to end, perhaps one of the author editor tools that Krizz was investigating yesterday (with the break ups of sections by chapter etc) might be really quite helpful?

I think nanowrimo is one of the greatest creative ideas I had ever heard about in a long time. Simply reading the forward to the book by the originators of the whole thing got me really motivated to try doing something. I have a BFA in painting, and one of the techniques they theorize about was how to teach art. The two differing ideas played quality against quantity. The effect always seemed to be that as you did more, you got higher quality work out of it. Nanowrimo uses this kinda same idea and is a way to produce quantity that you can then edit into quality.
Anyway, good luck on your endeavor.

@Chris – I’ve heard that story as well, about the pottery class where the professor tells half the class their grade is based on quality – they only have to turn in one pot, but it must be to certain standards – while the other half of the class will be graded on quantity – the sheer number of pounds of finished pots they create. And how, in the end, the half of the class that’s just churning out pots to hit their weight requirement ends up making better pots than the half focused on perfection.

It’s a neat story, and I’m hoping that the same is true of writing. And heck – I’ve posted, on average, 5 days a week for a few months short of two years, here at Too Many Annas. That’s a lot of writing! Blogging helps you with real usable skill… who knew! (Actually, blogging helps with a number of skills, but… yeah!)

I have two works already sitting unfinished at home. 1 psuedo sci-fi one and a pure fantasy affair that is alreay around 300 pages long and with half the story told. I just wish I wasn’t so easily distracted so that I could sit down and actually finish them.

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Too Many Annas ?

Anna is a 20-something gamer on the Feathermoon (US RP-PVE) Server in World of Warcraft. Here you'll find all kinds of
assorted things about WoW, including roleplay, raiding, and whatever else Anna feels like rambling about today. She's got a lot of alts, so you never know what you'll find!